John Peacock's erudite study of the self-reflexive nature of Van Dyck's Self-Portrait with Sunflowers (2006) was praised for his imaginative use of primary sources to address the picture's vivid intellectual context during the reign of King Charles I. His profound knowledge of Caroline literature, culture, and society outweighed his lesser familiarity with art historical studies in Northern Baroque portraiture.
The literary scholar now revisits the painter and the English court. Peacock's concern is the influence that Baldessare Castiglione's Cortegiano and its concept of sprezzatura exerted on the ideal of nobility even a century after its publication in 1528. While nobility was much debated and Castiglione's suggested kinship between a courtier and a painter faded in time, the concept transcended visual representations as exemplified by Van Dyck's courtly portraiture and transformed the very notion of nobility, as well as the self-awareness of the British aristocracy and other elites.
It is tempting to present traceable evidence for this since Van Dyck's sitters seem to embody the courtier's sprezzatura in such a way that the painter himself, through his art, elevated himself to nobility; that this is not an imagined embodiment but one that is fully supported by contemporary writings and discussions of the dual nature of nobility—lineage and merit—is eloquently argued throughout the different chapters of the book, which is perhaps as much a study of Castiglione's aftermath as a genealogy of diverging ideas on gentry or, indeed, Van Dyck.
The first chapter introduces Castiglione's book and its frequent evocations of artistic metaphors (painting, sculpture, and even architecture). Castiglione's profoundly rhetorical debates address the ideal courtier—his behavior, his appearance, his character—by alluding to artists and their craftmanship. Such allusions, Peacock demonstrates, were also featured in subsequent guides of conduct by authors like Giovanni Della Casa and Stefano Guazzo, as well as Laurence Humphry and James Cleland.
Peacock then looks at the notion of sprezzatura and investigates how its exercising perfection—both in action and in ethics—was to transform the courtier into a living portrait of the self. He addresses its literary reception and shows how, during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, authors of treatises on courtesy, starting with Tasso, gradually altered the Cortegiano's idealistic notions by presenting an increasingly precautionary attitude to the courtly environment. The emphasis shifted from the creation of a noble identity to the emulation of a variety of attitudes that were to ensure success and survival at court, as in Nicolas Faret's rewriting of Castiglione's book, published in 1630.
The third chapter is devoted to English-language works: Thomas Elyote's Governour (1531) and Henri Peacham's Compleat Gentleman (1622, revised 1634). It examines the role both authors assign to the arts in the education of nobles. Peacock looks at the latter's arguments for a nobleman's dual education in arms and in arts, and demonstrates that for Peacham some of his ideals were embodied by Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, and one of the earliest English patrons of Van Dyck. The discussion then moves to Franciscus Junius's Paintings of the Ancient, in which this librarian and admirer of Arundel revived the notion of sprezzatura as he embraced grace as a crowning quality of artistic expression that perfectly balances ingredients such as proportion, color, and so on. The study's first part concludes with the dissemination of Castiglione's ideas into art theory and how this, in turn, informed Bellori's narrative on Anthony van Dyck in his Lives of 1672, as well as an anonymous French biographer, who touches on the artist's transformation into a gentlemen's painter.
The three chapters of the book's second part examine selected portraits of noblemen by Van Dyck. The intriguing Portrait of George Gage with Two Men, now believed to have been painted in Rome in 1622, is the starting point of a discussion that moves on to Van Dyck's courtly portraits and double portraits made in England in the 1630s. Peacock argues convincingly that Van Dyck, sometimes in close discussion with his patrons, developed highly original, sometimes contrasting representations that commented on—and helped shape—the very nature and self-image of nobility.
